Airing Real Ailments of Real People

HEALTH DIARY

Hosted by Siobhan Cleary

KCET, Saturdays at 1:30 p.m.

*

If you’re interested in health, but even more interested in people, check out “Health Diary.” The first 13 weeks of the half-hour newsmagazine profiled all kinds of people with all kinds of problems--including glaucoma, nicotine addiction and obesity. The second 13 episodes, which kicked off Jan. 2, are just as diverse, examining everything from coffee drinking to asthma to stomach-stapling to animal helpers for people with disabilities.

In “Health Diary,” patients and their families take center stage. Sure, we hear from the doctors. And yes, we’re given interesting and useful medical information. But you won’t find shot after shot of high-tech machinery and white-coated scientists pipetting things into tubes.

Instead, what we get are kids with limb deficiencies demonstrating how they use their prosthetic arms to tie shoelaces and turn pages of a book; a teenage girl, seriously ill with cystic fibrosis, talking about her wait for a lung transplant; a professional cellist telling how she had to relearn her instrument from scratch after repetitive stress injuries nearly deep-sixed her career.

The program’s host, Irish broadcast journalist Siobhan Cleary, delivers the material in a mercifully noncloying way. She obviously believes that the stories of the people she profiles carry enough clout on their own. And they do. Saturday’s show features the teenage girl with cystic fibrosis, a boy who has obsessive compulsive disorder, and a 6-year-old girl recovering from leukemia.

It certainly made me quit my whining for a while.